JLH Design Blog

Adam Lasnik took a bold step forward recently at GWHG and opened up the forum for suggestions for Googler’s to respond to. In his own words:

We invite you to ask questions in this thread that:

• don’t deal with a specific site or sites
• are likely to be of interest to a great many webmasters around the world
• aren’t already covered in one of our recent blog posts or in our Help Center

I thought I’d take a stab at identifying some questions from every day non-professional SEO’s and web developers standpoint. This is based on my experience in GWHG and just some of the many often repeated questions we see. I was trying to be cognisant of the limitations that Googler’s must impart on themselves when offering information as we don’t want to help any spammers inadvertently. None of these are too in depth, nor all too insightful but they are FAQ that I don’t see answered (at least clearly) in their documentation. So here goes my list of subjects I think should be addressed:

1. Paid links clarification – There are two areas that need clarification with this issue. The Help Center says, ” Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results” yet we’ve heard from people like Adam Lasnik that, “the more common penalty applied in the case of linking schemes is for the link seller to have their ability to pass PageRank stripped away” By more common, I’m GUESSING that both the seller and the buyer can be penalized. However, what scares me, and probably most people is not understanding how the buyer is penalized as those are links on other sites and we’ve been told all along that other sites cannot harm your ranking. The other area that I’d like to see addressed is the Paid Directories references. Google pushes the yahoo directory in their guidelines, and Matt Cutts has defended them and give some guidelines on deciding whether or not a paid directory will be penalized or not. One of those directives centers around the review process that Yahoo uses. Is there somewhere I can apply to be granted the status us a reviewer? Is charging for links that are not nofollowed fine if you don’t accept all applications and clearly state it on the site? Is this a privilege reserved for Yahoo or can others gain this status?
2. Bad neighborhood – Not linking to a bad-neighborhood is often the advice given when evaluating a site. How are we supposed to determine what is a bad neighborhood anymore? Banned sites no longer have their PageRank gray barred, sites often have a ranking penalty applied while still showing all of their pages indexed, with the expansion of the supplemental index most sites can get almost all of their pages at least indexed. Is there any signal to look for other than a site being completely removed from the index?
3. Nofollow funneling vs. robots.txt, or both - Matt Cutts said, “The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out)” I can see how using nofollow on some of the links on a page will increase the value passed to the remaining links as the density has change, but I don’t understand the use of the robots.txt. Does this mean that if I had a page with 100 links on it and 99 of those links went to a pages that were blocked by robots.txt when the PageRank distribution is calculated the one link to a page that is not blocked would receive 100% of credit? After finding the links on a page and then visiting them and seeing a robots.txt block, does Google go back and recalculate the link juice for that page?
4. Incremental penalties - Various webmaster forums have long heated debates over minus this and minus that penalties. Could you expand on the existence of such actions where a site is just across the board demoted for everything. If it doesn’t exist it would be nice to hear that as well.
5. Homepage missing - Many, many, people have found their homepage missing yet the other pages on the site are still there. Is this an indication of anything, a bug, a hiccup, something to worry about, going to fix itself? Anything you can say on that would be great, it’s just happened too often to be coincidence.
6. Not ranking for your domain - One of the great many indicators that people use to determine if a site has suffered some sort of penalty is the “doesn’t rank for the domain name” test. Is there any validity to this? Or is it just misguided?
7. Meta tags - Could you please make a statement on which Metatags Google considers useful for it’s system?
8. No Messages - The message box in Webmaster Tools is great, though as you’ve stated you don’t notify 100% of penalties. The problem is that I don’t think its clear to people that not having a message does not mean you don’t have a penalty,the same goes for sitemap errors, robots.txt errors etc. People have flipped it to believe that a lack of a notice means that everything is fine. A post stating clarifying that would be wonderful
9. Reconsideration Request– I’ve seen it stated elsewhere but not officially the time it usually takes and the fact that multiple reconsideration requests aren’t looked on as a negative, something official would help.
10. Procedure for cross domain and in domain redirecting, is there a spamming threshold - What is the official stance on how to implement a sitewide redirect to a new domain, slowly, in chunks, all at once? The same for an in-site reconstruction. Is there an element of spam detection if someone 301’s too much?
11. Mythbusters post - I’d love to see some sort of mythbusting, official, post debunking some of the common Myths that you can.
12. Spam, paid link reporting fallacies - Once of the biggest reasons some people believe they’ve dropped down in the index is because someone has reported them as spam or as a link seller. Adam on the other hand has said in a comment before that you could report a site 40 million times and it won’t hurt their ranking (of course they could be dumped if they were indeed spamming). A statement to the point that if you are a good site, other people can’t harm you by submitting reports.
13. Bad External Links - Often people come to the group wondering if a link to them on some crap site is hurting them, I’d like to see an official statement to point to.

Like I said, nothing to in depth, just some of the more common questions and misconception that I’d like to see expounded upon.

I’m using Google Apps to create a spread sheet and then share a graph for the data. Looks like trending went down around ‘6′.

According to Google’s default #1 search result for [jedi mind trick]:

Jedi typically perform this ability with a wave of the hand and a verbal suggestion (for example, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”). If the trick is successful, the victim will reply by restating the suggestion (”These aren’t the droids we’re looking for”) and will immediately think or do whatever the Jedi suggested.

Two days of ago Google’s most famous Googler said that the DMOZ home page had disappeared due to a ill conceived 301 redirect. Today the official DMOZ blog took time out of their busy schedule of not approving competitor’s sites to clarify the situation and say that the real reason was actually:

…changing the root domain from dmoz.org to www.dmoz.org. What we all witnessed yesterday and what was reported by the great sites above was part of an index recognizing, adjusting and updating in real time. This was confirmed in discussions we had with Google…

From this exchange I can only wonder about a few possibilities:

• Google waved their hand and said, “those are real time adjusting and updating” and DMOZ obliged and responded with, “those are real time adjusting and updating”
• Matt Cutts needs to talk to his crawl team who seemingly fed him some bad information
• DMOZ actually doesn’t have the skills required to institute a proper 301 redirect
• Google fell on the sword and decided to look like fools and said that they can’t handle domain canonicalization
• If you have a site with a home page with PageRank of 9 or less (that’s only a small percentage of the web) you should reconsider instituting a 301 redirect, lest Google will loose you for a few days of recognizing and adjusting
• Minty fresh results only apply to lower PageRank blogs and not older established sites
• Google actually had a big screw up, instead of sending Adam Lasnik out to say it was a Bad Data Push, they waved their hand and buffaloed DMOZ into doing their dirty work for them
• There are screw-ups, cover-ups, and foul-ups going on here

Note to DMOZ, if you have to continually remind people that you are not dead or dying, you are dead or dying.

• Today, “DMOZ is not dying folks. We’re growing every day. Globally.”
• Two days ago, “the editor community is very much alive and thriving”

I’ll be going to Oktoberfest this weekend, it will be nothing like the real one that I attended in Munich a few years ago, but it’s our humble version of the real thing.The kids love the parade and dad loves the bier.

I think my first stop will be to meet with the web designer, they still have a hit counter on there! I’m surprised it didn’t tell me that the site was best viewed with Internet Explorer 4.0.

Gemutlichkeit!

Just in case you missed it.

John Mueller, famously known for his band of followers the Muellerites, is interviewed by Cristina on a technical and personal level.

There’s been some rumblings lately around the fact that the DMOZ home page was removed from the index. I don’t pay too much attention to the DMOZ, but in this case it was interesting. I started to follow various threads in the webmastering/SEO community diligently as I’ve seen this “lost my homepage” behavior many times in GWHG. I even made an appeal on behalf of the unfortunate webmasters which was ignored.

Matt Cutts, the true ambassador to the webmaster, came through and answered the question, even taking time from electronic cat gadgets and their pedometers to do so.

Hey all, I dug into this a little bit with the help of a couple crawl folks. It looks like when Googlebot tried to fetch http://www.dmoz.org/, we got a 301 redirect back to http://www.dmoz.org/ . It looks like that self-loop has been going on for several days. We were last able to fetch the root page successfully on Sept. 10th, but from that point on DMOZ was returning these 301-to-itself pages, and after a few days Googlebot gave up on trying to fetch the url.

This makes sense, as Googlebot hit the page it would get a 301 response saying that the new page was the page it hit. When that information got to the normal process that handles 301s it probably just faulted out. Since no other information on a page loads after a 301 (normally) they would have to remove the page as they’d have no data for it.

Here’s the odd thing

When I first heard of this, several days ago, i visited the DMOZ site, and viewed it just fine. Depending on your browser, you can’t view a page that redirects to itself, as this example I’ve set up. Internet Explorer will just sit there and spin, Firefox will eventually give you an error message, and using an online tool will let you know that there is an error.

Pure Conjecture

Matt Cutts has been doing this a long time and probably the best at speaking around issues when he needs to (protecting secrets, towing the company line, etc) but never has there ever been any appearance of being anything less than truthful, so I will by default dispel the idea that he was giving us bad information. So how can I not see a 301 redirect, no one else mentions that the page won’t load ANYWHERE in all the discussions, but yet Googlebot sees the behavior?

1. All things considered, the simplest explanation is usually the best, perhaps the 301 redirect was briefly shown only when Googlebot happened to visit the site, but not long enough for anyone to take note of it.
2. They somehow managed to return a 301 response code, but not the redirect. This is something I tried to simulate on many platforms but could not. The browsers and tools I used all seemed to expect the redirect location and either defaulted to one or erred out. Google on the other hand doesn’t actually CRAWL anything, they just hit the page and return back with whatever it saw. I don’t know enough about how the interwebby works to really say if this is a possibility or not, it is after all pure conjecture.
3. They were cloaking their 301 only showing it to Googlebot (or other bots for that matter) and not to regular users with a browser or not from Google’s IP range.
4. Perhaps the 301 was referrer based, and when there was no referrer it showed the redirect. Googlebot, since she runs on a predetermined schedule of URLs to crawl would not show a referrer.

Any other ideas that I am too simple to see?

For my international readers, I’m trying to not be the ugly American and exposing my kids to new things, including soccer.  I don’t understand the fascination with it at all, it bores me to tears as there doesn’t appear to be any strategy whatsoever, but that may be because we are dealing with six year old kids here.

All this talk about white, gray, or black hats.  Let’s not forget the bucket hats.

This is what happens when a son asks his mechanical engineer father to build him something to hold butterflies.  He ends up with a contraption that has three doors and a remote operated isolation chamber.  It’s so heavy the poor kid can’t move it, on the other hand you could park a truck on it and it would support the weight.

David Naylor posed an interesting question, ” What would I do if I were Google?” To which I quickly and without much thought responded:

1. Stop preaching and start helping/answering questions/communicating.
2. Disable the worthless link: command.
3. Show supplemental pages in webmaster’s central
4. Update statistics every 5 years or so in webmaster’s central.
5. Give up on the nofollow disaster they’ve created and let people get back to making sites for people and not machines.

BONUS
6. Update their webmaster’s blog more than quarterly.

Adam Lasnik took some time out of his weekend to respond to my comment with his own thoughts on the subject.

Okay, JLH, I’ll bite (again :P)

> 1. Stop preaching and start helping/answering questions/communicating.

Like a Help Center in 18 languages? Dozens of Googlers at conferences around the world? Dozens of Googler Posts a month in U2U groups in multiple languages? (and counting John Mueller, we’re now talking a lot more posts :D)

> 2. Disable the worthless link: command.

Why? So competitors can’t get a sampling of your backlinks? Don’t be greedy!

> 3. Show supplemental pages in webmaster’s central

I don’t see this as likely, but I expect we’ll be offering more tools that help webmasters get at the root of issues rather than fumbling along trying to make incorrect assumptions just based upon what index a document happens to be placed in. I won’t even mention that *all* the other major search engines have gone on record as noting they have multiple distinct indexes, and yet I haven’t seem people clamoring for tags in that context.

> 4. Update statistics every 5 years or so in webmaster’s central.

I expect updates in Webmaster Tools will be more frequent.

> 5. Give up on the nofollow disaster they’ve created and let people get back to making sites for people and not machines.

Should we also give up on robots.txt, too, since that’s for machines rather than people, right? I expect nofollow will be used with increasing precision and fairness; e.g., expiring nofollows for trusted contributors.

> BONUS
> 6. Update their webmaster’s blog more than quarterly.

8 posts in the last month… and that’s not counting our German or Chinese webmaster blogs, either. Methinks you have a strange conception of quarterly ;).

I thought I’d respond here instead of Dave’s site, because, well I can take my time. Plus since he nofollows his comments like Google wants, it will show up as a one-way link to him, and that’s got to far outweigh anything I could add to his blog post.

First up, I’m not quite sure what to make of Adam’s opening volley, “Okay, JLH, I’ll bite (again :P).” The ‘I’ll bite’ implies some sort of adversarial relationship between us and ‘again’ indicates that this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten under his skin. If this is true, I’d say that’s sad, because as hard as it is to believe we are on the same team. Oh sure, people don’t fawn over my every comment, but I’d like to think I am doing as much as my limited capabilities will allow to help webmaster’s construct their sites better for Google’s sake. I’d imagine that a few of the thousands of post’s I’ve made have helped a person or two. It’s actually not easy work, the hardest part is figuring out who to try to help along and who is just a two-bit-spammer looking to get their MFA site back in the index. I’m sure after a while he thinks I am working against Google as the only thing he probably sees is the negative postings, but believe me when I my rants are in the hope of improving things, but I digress. Let’s get to his list.

1. This may be more a matter of my poor communication skills than any real conflict. If you take my original statement and add “more” to the end of it, it would have been closer to my real meaning. I don’t want to sound like I am completely dissing their efforts so far, they’ve been admirable. The new FAQ are great and the continued webmaster guidelines updates are welcome. I do take issue with Google’s (or maybe just Adam’s) assessment that the conferences attending is meant for anyone but the very very small minority of people that actually go to them. Some even have a moratorium that the information cannot be shared. Conferences are not meant or designed to be ways to disseminate information to the masses but rather to the paying attendees. Sure a few people blog about them, but really even that reaches a very small audience when compared to the millions and millions of site owners out there. When I talk about communication with webmasters, I am speaking about the real salt-of-the-earth types who own and maintain one site, their own. The professional bloggers, search engine watchers, and big-time SEO’s probably already got your ear anyway. I have noticed that Google has changed the emphasis on promoting the GWHG from being an official Google help group to a community of like minded webmasters. It will be the death of the group by the way, but that’s another story. The group averages eight to nine thousand posts a month, if Adam thinks that “dozens” of Googler responses is the only effort they need to put forth, then I am truly disappointed. I would have thought they were working on improving that, but I was mistaken, and saddened. I am trying to inspire Google to help get the word out to the other 99.9999% of site owners that don’t go to conferences or have Adam’s ear.
2. Regarding the link: command, I just think it’s a disservice to the brand and quality that Google has worked many years to develop. You, I, and Adam know why it’s been crippled but the average person (remember him/her? The one that can’t afford to go to your conferences) is looking for information on their site and know of all the links that are out there and then see that Google can’t find them. If for some reason they see the need to keep the crippled version live they should really add a disclaimer saying that it is intentionally broken, if for no other reason for brand protection. “You want to organize the worlds information, but yet from the outside you cannot even return accurate results” is the impression from the outside. I invite anyone doubting this to spend a few hours combing through the posts at the GWHG and despite being clearly mentioned in the FAQ section it is still a concern. Once again, fixing this would be to Google’s benefit, not John’s.
3. Show supplemental results or don’t show them. My concerns are not with the tag itself, as I think that caused more trouble than its worth. Again, I am looking out for the webmaster not the professional. I’d love it if people were able to diagnose crawling and ranking issues based on site architecture. The supplemental tag gave us at least some feedback, but if you’ve got plans for better tools, I’m willing to wait. I won’t even mention that the subject of the original post was what you would do if you were Google, not if you were the other search engines. Oh wait, I did mention it, oops.
4. More frequent updates would make the information their usable, right now it just satisfies curiosity at best. Thank you for the update.
5. Sure robots.txt is for machines, then again so is HTML as I have yet to see any work without one. What I was referring to was the concept of having the webmaster community being the ones to judge which links are relative or not. Not only requiring them to judge, but also penalizing for not judging correctly, in the case of paid links. If Google really thinks that the webmasters are capable of adding nofollow where appropriate and not using it were inappropriate then why don’t they start ranking pages based on the keyword meta tag then? Since they’ve got so much trust in millions of site owners knowing the correct application of the nofollow attribute then they should also trust the webmasters ability to know what his/her site is about. Google has made billions on being able to rank web pages, invest some of that into figuring out which links are good and which ones are not. AGAIN, spend a little time in GWHG looking at real sites, not just talking to the likes of Danny Sullivan and other search rockstars. There are people royally screwing up their sites with the misguided use of nofollow and I have yet to see any proactive approach to helping those people.
6. In all fairness, two of those eight blog posts were put up after my comment, and only three so far this month, and six all of August. It would be great if some of these dozens of Googlers would write down their speeches at conferences and post them online, or even if you all took turns putting out a post a day. That way it would only come around to you once every couple weeks. There are thousands of blogs devoted to Google that find plenty to write about, I’d think you all in the midst of it could think of something meaningful to say at least once a day. Then again if you are satisfied with what I would consider mediocre communications then I don’t have a chance of convincing you other wise. You can’t fix something that you don’t recognize is broken.

So there it is, my response. Harsh? yes, but if you look at it from an honest point of view I am only concerned with these issues because I think if they were addressed the quality of the index, quality of sites, and thus Google would improve. If that’s adversarial inferring bait to which Adam needs to bite, I’m sorry. Since we are not actually engaged in a discussion here, I know how writing can turn quickly from responding to something to defending yourself, I do it all the time.

Being the sheep that I am I added the BlogRush widget to my left sidebar, so for now it’s on probation. Feel free to sign up and check it out yourself.

Google has removed all references to Matt Cutts in it’s index, not a single page can be found.

The the search for yourself on Google: [Matt Cutts]

Google evangelist Adam Lasnik as also been banned from showing up in the results: [Adam Lasnik]

But new Googler extraordinaire John Mueller still has a strong showing: [John Mueller]

If you are not a mechanical engineer or someone that deals with steam based calculations daily then you can skip reading the rest of this.

What I’ve set up is an Excel Add-In that adds the steam tables as functions to be used like any other functions within your excel applications. I’ll leave it on the site, on the off chance that someone will actually find it to download.

This simple little add-In adds dozens of functions to your install of Microsoft Excel. The functions return steam properties so you can use them in your calculations without having to reference a steam table.

Installation instructions are included in the download.

The following functions will be added to your excel:

tempP - Returns the Steam Temperature (F) at given Pressure in PSIG
sensP - Returns the Sensible Heat (Btu/lb) at given Pressure in PSIG
latentP - Returns the Latent Heat (Btu/lb) at given Pressure in PSIG
condvolumeP - Returns the Condensate Volume (ft3/lb) at given Pressure in PSIG
steamvolumep - Returns the Steam Volume (ft3/lb) at given Pressure in PSIG
PressureT - Returns the Steam Pressure (PSIG) at given Temperature (F)
SensT - Returns the Sensible Heat (Btu/lb) at given Temperature (F)
LatentT - Returns the Latent Heat (Btu/lb) at given Temperature (F)
condvolumeT - Returns the Condensate Volume (ft3/lb) at given Temperature (F)
steamvolumeT - Returns the Steam Volume (ft3/lb) at given Temperature (F)
tempL - Returns the Steam Temperature (F) at given Latent Heat in BTU/LB
PressureL - Returns the Steam Pressure (PSIG) at given Latent Heat in BTU/LB
sensL - Returns the Steam Sensible Heat (Btu/LB) at given Latent Heat in BTU/LB
condvolumeL - Returns the Cond Volume (Ft3/LB) at given Latent Heat in BTU/LB
steamvolumeL - Returns the Steam Volume (Ft3/LB) at given Latent Heat in BTU/LB
PressureS - Returns the Steam Pressure (PSIG) at given Sensible Heat in BTU/LB
tempS - Returns the Steam Temperature (F) at given Sensible Heat in BTU/LB
latentS - Returns the Steam Latent Heat (Btu/LB) at given Sensible Heat in BTU/LB
condvolumeS - Returns the Cond Volume (Ft3/LB) at given Sensible Heat in BTU/LB
steamvolumeS - Returns the Cond Volume (Ft3/LB) at given Sensible Heat in BTU/LB
PressureC - Returns the Steam Pressure (PSIG) at given Cond Volume in Ft3/LB
tempC - Returns the Steam Temperature (F) at given Cond Volume in Ft3/LB
latentC - Returns the Steam Latent Heat (Btu/LB) at given Cond Volume in Ft3/LB
SensC - Returns the Steam Sensible Heat (Btu/LB) at given Cond Volume in Ft3/LB
steamvolumeC - Returns the Steam Volume (Ft3/LB) at given Cond Volume in Ft3/LB
PressureSV - Returns the Steam Pressure (PSIG) at given Steam Volume in Ft3/LB
tempSV - Returns the Steam Temperature (F) at given Steam Volume in Ft3/LB
latentSV - Returns the Steam Latent Heat (Btu/LB) at given Steam Volume in Ft3/LB
SensSV - Returns the Steam Sensible Heat (Btu/LB) at given Steam Volume in Ft3/LB
condvolumeSV - Returns the Cond Volume (Ft3/LB) at given Steam Volume in Ft3/LB

Matt Cutts now has a new sentence at the bottom of his blog posts,

Got a webmaster-related question or suggestion that is not directly related to the topic of this entry? Instead of posting it here, your best bet is our official Google forum linked from http://www.google.com/webmasters/

I initially had mixed feelings on this and even concerns but I am now coming around to this being a good sign of things to come.

My number one concern was the fact that the group is basically self-running with little to no official interaction. Oh sure, once a week* or less someone comes on in and answers a question, but as a percentage of user participation that number is really down lately, despite Adam’s threat* that more people at Google were interested in helping out. Google’s webmaster’s central already funnels too many people looking for answers with too few people actually answering that I don’t know how much more load the system can handle. We know that they’ve hired at least one great new employee to work in webmaster relations, but he was also the #1 question answerer* so that void will need to be filled some how.

On a positive note this does signal at least that Matt is acknowledging that the Webmaster Help Group is THE OFFICIAL help group. Despite his belief that everyone that is a webmaster lives in California , hopefully funneling people towards it will help increase it’s visibility. I do find it odd that he would link to webmaster central* with instruction on finding the link and not the group* itself.

I am only grasping at straws and possibly living on false hope, but with Matt Cutts officially endorsing THE OFFICIAL webmaster help group I am taking this is a sign that they are going to work on consolidating all of the information put out there in a more central location. This subject was discussed at length in a thread* started by Susan Moskwa (of blue badge fame), sorry www.searchenginewebsitelandforumMOZroundtable.com. With all of the discussion by Googlers about things “being a scalable solution” you’d think they’d want to approach webmaster support in the same manner. Having ‘X’ amount of Googlers posting answers in ‘Y’ arenas really waters down the message that should be being served up in THE OFFICIAL help group, regardless of your geographic location and whether or not you can get free tickets to stand in a room with a search engineer.

* over 2900 (10 of which were even helpful to someone) posts of free content on which to serve your ads by me* and nary a link or acknowledgement and nofollowing all your own links get’s you nofollowed in my book.